Mac Cahal

Apple's Vision Pro is an isolating product on purpose. I don't think Apple wants a future where everyone in a room is wearing Vision Pro. You don't either. It's meant to be a solitary experience in your physical space and a connective immersive experience in the digital space. That's why you'll never see marketing materials showing multiple people wearing headsets. My parents filmed and photographed everything when I was a kid growing up. I have boxes of home video tapes and photo albums. You know what's crazy though? I don't have a single notable memory of seeing my parents using a camera, but I remember the moments in those saved photos & videos. What happens when that camera is a headset though? Is your memory now of that experience tainted by the fact that someone had goggles on their face? Probably. What if everyone is wearing headsets? Now even the captured memories show you and your friends wearing goggles. You don't want that. Apple doesn't either. We'll be shooting these Vision Pro experiences the same way we capture moments now. iPhones. This was maybe the one misstep in their launch. They shouldn't have shown someone taking photos and videos with the headset on. The concept of spatial photos and videos is remarkable but LiDAR and all the ARkit tech is already embedded in our devices for this to work. You're not going to wear Vision Pro to a concert to post instagram stories. You're going to watch the clips from your phone of the concert on your Vision Pro whenever you want after. When the people you love are gone you won't be wishing you didn't take that spatial photo or video because "headsets are dystopian!" - You'll wish that you shot more. I think cameras are a gift and we should take every advantage of them that we can. Just like my parents did with VHS camcorders and 35mm cameras. You can't walk back the last 20 years of social media and smartphones. We're all head down scrolling on a 2D screen. You can be upset (rightfully so) but you can't change it. Someone needs to innovate a solution. How do we connect better online because it's quite apparent we all prefer to be here instead? I think Meta is also on the right path for this just in a less polished way. Maybe it's time we at least look up and around us. Even if it's scary to think that's in an AR headset it's absolutely better than staring at a phone. Is seeing someone in 3D space where you can actually look at them more isolating than conversing with iMessage? No. The only dystopian argument against Vision Pro that I agree with is why would you bother to experience the real thing when the virtual experience is just as good? I don't know the answer and I'm not sure Apple does either. We'll probably have a few more golden years of headsets being niche and uncommon in the wild but eventually all bets are off. If you want to relive a birthday party someone still needs to film the birthday party... but in order to film the birthday party it has to actually happen. There's a possible future where that party now just happens in a 3D FaceTime instead. Apple has engineered and priced this headset to be niche on purpose. Forget the engineering and tech costs... I think they know if it was affordable and accessible they'd completely change the way the world works virtually overnight. We need time to figure out the societal impact and the tech that needs to be invented to solve those problems. That's why Vision Pro is an isolating product. It's by design.